With Domino now a mature product with a massive global installed base of nearly 100 million users, it seems incredible to contemplate building collaborative applications on a different platform. After all, Domino is the undisputed leader in the groupware category. Other companies have claimed to offer equivalent products built upon email servers or leveraging features of operating systems, but these promises have never borne fruit, presumably because the underlying technology was insufficient to rival Domino.

In a daring move reminiscent of Ray Ozzie's announcing at Lotusphere '96 that Domino would incorporate Internet-based standards and become a Web application platform, Ambuj Goyal, the new General Manager of Lotus Software, announced at Lotusphere 2003 that IBM's next generation of collaboration products would be built on WebSphere and not Domino. How can this be true?

Java, Java, Java
Domino broke new ground and became an important platform for intranet, extranet, and Internet-based applications, and Domino remains the undisputed groupware champion. However, the Web has not held still, and Web application servers have opened a major new market where Domino is not a significant player. The main reason for this is Domino was not built on or around Java technologies and only added support for them over time. Meanwhile, the Web embraced Java and was quickly dominated by applets, servlets, JSP (Java Server Pages), and EJB (Enterprise Java Beans). While Domino embraces Java and extends applications to the Web, it's not a Java development platform comparable to WebSphere, WebLogic, or Sun ONE Application Server.

Domino's support of Java, however, is very substantial: Domino offers back-end classes for integration of applications and data; JDBC (Java Database Connector) support; the ability to use the JavaScript language for Web applications and to integrate Java applets; the ability to run servlets; support for both client and server Agents written in Java; and support for JSP in the form of a tag library. But Domino only supports the version 2.2 servlet container, the version 1.1.8 JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and JSP version 1.1. Pure Java developers find themselves constrained by Domino while Domino developers, some of whom may have learned Java mainly to extend Domino applications to the Web, find they have adequate Java support.

Adoption of J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) is the line that Java support in Domino will not cross. Web application servers have both a servlet container and EJB container, but Domino does not have an EJB container and is not J2EE compliant. Developers and customers building Web applications in a Java development environment don't consider Domino to be either a Web application server or a Java development environment. In general, it's not possible to create a Lotus Notes or Domino application using 100% Java or strictly using Java development tools. This means that, as a practical matter, while Domino developers can access Java and the Web, Java and Web developers can't access Domino.